Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)Movies

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” may be deeply mediocre and ultra-predictable — but before you Marvel fans race to your keyboards to protest, let me start with some things I liked.

There’s a highly entertaining performance by a cast-against-type Robert Redford at its center, and it gets some points by trying to spice up the oh-so-familiar Marvel formula with more hand-to-hand combat in between all the computer-generated battles.

Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson are in good form as the defrosted super-soldier Captain America and the sexy Natasha/Black Widow who fails to thaw him romantically — plus there’s considerably more humor than in “Marvel’s The Avengers’’ (which I found pretty enervating).

Scarlett Johansson stars...